


Dead Stars Don't Orbit

by sugarinfurs



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25458280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarinfurs/pseuds/sugarinfurs
Summary: Hello! This is meant to be read like lore entries; separate, yet detailing a greater story when read together.Enjoy!





	1. 1

When Portia heard whispers of a new Hive queen haunting the edge of the Milky Way, she strapped on her helmet, jumped into her ship, and set her course in the direction of the rumors.

The warlock’s first stop was to Io, one of Jupiter’s many great moons, its surface still crackling with the remnants of the Traveler. It was here she meditated and gathered her thoughts before continuing on into the darkness. As did many of her warlock brothers and sisters whose footsteps she followed, she found near hypnotic seduction whenever she stepped foot onto the moon. It was almost painful to return to her ship.

Next came the icy graveyard of Europa. Whereas on Io Portia had celebrated the Light within her, on Europa she honored those venerated before her time. She felt city ruins and old bones crunching beneath her feet. A deafening, sickening silence rang in her ears. Nothing here but phantoms haunting space.

As Portia climbed back inside her spaceship once more, she wondered the greatest distance humanity had ever traveled into the Great Dark Beyond. Wondered if the people of the Golden Age ever discovered salvation outside the system. Wondered if they'd welcome her with open arms if she were to find them.

“How far away from the Light do you think we can stray?” She haphazardly asked her Ghost. The ascent of her ship was unnaturally smooth as it took off.

The little machine beeped. She pondered back. 

Portia smiled to herself as she pulled off her helmet. “I’d tell, but then I’d have to kill ya.”


	2. 2

On her way to the outskirts of the Solar System, Portia spruced up on her knowledge of Hive mythos.

“Did you know the Hive are probably as old as our planet?” The Awoken mumbled, bemused. "Earth, that is."

Her Ghost, floating in bits and pieces as she materialized her data into quantifiable measurements, plainly stated, “Well, yes. I know everything.”

Portia passed through the cloud of data, blithely knocking a piece of her Ghost out of place with the flick of a finger. “I bet you can’t tell what I’m thinking right now.”

“That I’m getting on your nerves,” the robot retorted, rearranging herself.

The Awoken rolled her eyes. “You’re lucky I like you.”

Daphne, her Ghost, beeped at her. “Like me? You _need_ me. You wouldn’t last a day without me. Literally. I’ve seen you use a gun, it isn’t pretty.”

A pale blue dot flickered out in the distance. Portia stared down - or was it up? - at the methane-laden oceans of Titan through the cockpit of her ship. She thought about Sloane all alone down on that rock, solitary defender against the Darkness, singlehandedly protecting the inner system from horrors unspeakable.

A lonely Guardian, immortal warrior of Light, endlessly marching forward in time.

Where had she heard _that_ before?


	3. 3

Portia had lost track of how many nights she’d spent sleeping inside her ship.

But that statement in and of itself presented a brain-splitting conundrum.

Night. Day.

Because day and night implied the revolution of one celestial body around another. Around and around, again and again, over and over, like the unsettling promise that was the tick, tock, tick of time.

This far out in the universe, what did “day” and “night” even mean? What’s a day without a sun to make it a day in the first place?

If Portia ejected herself from the Milky Way, and cozied up on some new planet in some system rotating a star she’d never heard of before, would that be her new day? 10 hours, 24 hours, 100 hours.

In this age, humans had touched every inch of the solar system, every dusty rock and distant planetoid. A day on Earth was different than a day on Venus was different than a day on Mercury.

At what point was a “day” no longer a day?

It was paradoxical at best, maddening at worst. The thought of it all gave Portia a headache. She asked her Ghost how close they were.

“Closer than you think _,,_ ” the warlock’s companion reported back. “What do you suppose we’re going to find out here?”

Portia fell quiet. She gazed out the window of her ship, watching as the light of her sun grew dimmer and dimmer on the cosmic horizon. “Nothing good,” she remarked despondently. “There isn’t anything good that comes from being this far from the light.”

As the sun disappeared from her view, the woman wondered if she too would find herself sucked into some event horizon of her own, passed the point of no return. She damned her obsessive impulses and cursed her empathetic soul as her ship plunged deeper into the heart of the universe.


	4. 4

Portia was nervous. And she had every right to be.

The light from her star was far, far, far gone by now. Neither humans nor Awoken nor Exo alike were designed to bear the weight of the universe on their shoulders.

No sane creature voluntarily ventured this far to the edge of the solar system. There was nothing to be found this deep into the galaxy, save for isolated questions and empty answers, loose atoms and pockets of nothingness.

“Daphne, tell me something. Anything,” Portia asked of her Ghost. She needed something to distract her mortal mind from the horrible infiniteness of the cosmos.

“You see that little dot over there?” buzzed the robot. Portia couldn’t, but didn’t want to ruin the moment, so she nodded. “That’s 28978 Ixion, provisional designation 2001 KX76. It’s a plutino, an object that has a 2:3 orbital resonance with Neptune. It’s named after the king of the Lapiths from Greek mythology.”

Portia blinked wordlessly as her robotic companion regurgitated from her nearly depthless reservoir of knowledge. “You don’t… know what any of that means, do you?” Daphne added.

The Awoken woman extended her arm, watching as her Ghost floated gently to the palm of her hand. “I don’t think _you_ know what any of that means, Little Light,” Portia rebutted.

A look of befuddlement shone in Daphne’s single ocular module, so her owner explained. “You can parrot your impressive information all you want. Any codex or computer could tell me the logistics of some no-name rock in the middle of the abyss. But what does it mean to you?

The Ghost beeped intermittently as she turned inward, flipping through hundreds of files a second and digging through her internal subroutines. Eventually she released a jubilant series of beeps, and announced her findings in an exuberant tone - “The Greeks were an ancient race of peoples on planet Earth that crafted an empire so perfectly infallible, they left their mark on the universe forever.” She stopped. “But that’s… not what you meant.”

The woman smiled, yet it faded prematurely. She felt bittersweet nostalgia tugging at her heart. Human history both saddened and frightened her. It was a useless subject to cry over, a simple blip on the radar.

Portia wasn’t even fully human anymore, no longer made of the same atom and stardust and consciousness of her ancient ancestors. Was she allowed to mourn the loss of a heritage that no longer belonged to her?

Humanity’s history had been reset more times than any Exo that ever wandered the universe. Not even Ikora's greatest scholars and historians knew what year it was anymore. The history of the human race may have been as intangible and hypothetical as any line of code in a Golden Age computer.

Add to the fact that the Awoken, her own people, were all but freaks of nature, her very existence was beginning to feel like a cruel joke perpetrated by the cosmos.

Portia felt the weight of the entire human race on her chest when her Ghost interrupted her thoughts. “Portia,” she beeped, “we’re close.”


	5. 5

_Answer: Yes._

Portia didn’t like guns.

Why waste a bullet when your fists are forever, she’d say.

Pulling the trigger told the universe where to find you, calling like a moth to the flame. Pulling the trigger was an answer before the question, one you could never take back. Pulling the trigger cost you - bullets, time, the element of surprise.

It cost Portia nothing to channel the calamitous fury of Jupiter storms through her repurposed arcsword.

Or to bury her blade into the shriveled, sunken husk of a Hive.

Or to rip off the head of a Vex goblin unit.

Or to punch a Cabal legionary with all the intensity of a bolt of lightning.

The Light was with her. And she was the Light. She had her blade, and her Ghost, and the universe protecting her. An instrument of cosmic justice, raining righteous retribution against the terrible unknown.

Judge, jury, executioner.

Portia didn’t need guns. They were brutal and garish.

But sometimes, Portia couldn’t reach a particularly pesky Hive wizard with her blade. Sometimes, the Fallen would send squads of vandals to protect their walkers as they scoured Old Russia for gear and scrap.

Sometimes, you found yourself on a deserted alien moon about 4 billion miles away from the closest backup.

So when Portia told Daphne to transmat her old scout rifle, the Ghost did so without a word. By the time that the gun had materialized in Portia’s hands her finger was already on the trigger.

She looked at the writhing swarm of thralls in front of her and let the first bullet fly.

_Question: If I call to the Light, will the Light protect me?_


	6. 6

Every time she traveled far away from home, Portia always dreamt that the Tower would no longer be standing by the time she got back.

It wasn’t a nightmare so much as it was a promise. The Tower was a temporary arrangement, a brief moment of respite and reprieve that was, ultimately, insignificant. It, like everyone that it protected, and everything it stood for, would inevitably crumble into nothingness with the grueling passage of time.

Some day, an incomprehensible number of years into the future, when numbers no longer have any meaning, the Earth, the Sun, even the Milky Way will all be no more.

There’s that word again.

 _Day_.

A billion billion years from now, when the Sun is all but a cloud of ash and nuclear fusion, how will you know when a day has passed?

Will there come a time when Portia's children's children's children's children's children's (continued ad nauseam) no longer knew the embrace of the sun's warmth, the very kiss of life itself?

Perhaps the most unsettling thought of all, however, was the cumbersome knowledge that Portia could bear witness to her own star burning out and dying. Assuming that the Light hadn’t long since abandoned her by that point, of course.

Portia wondered if the Light, like all things, had an expiration date.

She asked herself which was the worse fate - dying, or living?

The Hive knight’s sword swung inches from her face, millimeters from slicing her in twain, leaving behind a crater where she once stood. It hissed in gruesome agony when the bolt of lightning tore it apart from the inside out.

As the woman carved her way through the Hive army, blade crackling with arclight, the Wizard’s cacophonous screams shook the moon to its core. Each acolyte, thrall, knight she left lifeless in her wake only served to make the screaming louder, filling her head inescapably.

“Hold on to something,” Portia told her Ghost as the chamber rumbled and the clap of thunder boomed in the distance, drowning out the sounds of the Wizard.

The smell of ozone penetrated the air. A bright light painted the sky. Then the screaming stopped.


	7. 7

“Dysnomia?” The bewildered Tower citizen asked. “Where’s that at?”

A second voice rang out. “It’s out passed Pluto. It’s out passed the Kuiper Belt, even,” said Amanda Holliday. Her blonde hair was pocked with specks of oil. “Takes a hell of a ship to make it all the way out there.” The pilot narrowed her eyes. “What were you doin’ all the way out there, kiddo?”

Portia, unconcerned, rolled her shoulders. “Just a hunch,” she flatly stated.

Amanda faltered, but continued on nonetheless. “Well, did you at least find something out there?”

A pregnant pause punctuated the conversation. “No,” Portia replied, "I found nothing.” The shipwright didn’t press any further, seemingly satisfied with the answer.

After Portia gifted her ship over to Amanda for routine maintenance, she took a walk through the terraces and catwalks overlooking the City.

Her Ghost buzzed to life, floating alongside her. “Why did you lie to Holliday?”

“I didn’t lie to Holliday,” the woman responded, leaning against a railing.

Daphne chirped confusedly. “But you told her you found nothing.”

“No,” Portia corrected, “I found Nothing.”

The two fell silent. After a few minutes, Daphne piped up. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she confessed. “When you asked how far we can stray from the light.”

Intrigued, Portia turned to her Ghost. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” the little robot asserted. “And the answer is, well… as long as I'm with you, you’ll always have the Light, right?”

The woman smiled. “Right.”

Portia looked out at the silent Traveler, baking in the forgiving warmth of starlight.

To the Earth, it was just another day. To the Sun, it was nothing.


End file.
